Galileo's Dream

Chapter thirteen Always Already

Laid out in the garden shivering, Galileo looked around himself. There he was, looking around himself. It was just before sunrise, at Bellosguardo. In the dawn light, the citrons on their branches glowed like little Ios.

Cartophilus was sitting on the ground beside him, wrapped in a blanket. He had thrown another one over Galileo’s supine form. Galileo croaked at him; Cartophilus nodded and gave him a cup of watered-down wine. Galileo sat up and drank it, then gestured for more. Cartophilus refilled the cup from a jug.

Galileo drank some more. He blinked, looking around him, sniffing, then crumbling a clod of dirt in his hand. He regarded the citron bush curiously, leaning toward the big terra-cotta pot containing it.

“How long was I gone?”

“All night.”

“That’s all?”

“Did it feel longer?”

“Yes.”

Cartophilus shrugged. “You were gone longer than usual.”

Galileo was staring at him.

Cartophilus sighed. “She didn’t give you the amnestic.”

“No. They were too busy fighting. I left Hera on Io, sinking into lava! Do you know her?”

“I know her.”

“Good. I want to go back and help. Can you send me back now?”

“Not now, maestro. You need to eat, and get some rest.”

Galileo considered it. “I suppose I need to give her time to get out of that fix, anyway. If she can. But soon.”

Cartophilus nodded.

Galileo poked him with a finger. “This stranger of yours, the Ganymede—did you know he is a kind of Savonarola? That his cult is reviled by the rest of the Jovians, and that now they are fighting?”

“Yes, I’m aware of that.” Cartophilus gestured at the teletrasporta. “I can see here what happens to you there, if I stay in the complementary field. As for Ganymede, I am not one of his people anymore. I just tend the device. I stay with it. Things around Jupiter are always changing. The people in power aren’t the same. Their attitude toward entanglement is not the same.”

“How long have you been keeping this end of the teletrasporta?”

“Too long.”

“How long?” Galileo insisted.

Cartophilus waggled his hand. “Let’s not talk about it now, maestro. I’ve been up all night, I’m tired.”

Galileo yawned hugely. “Me too. I’m thrashed. Help me up. But later we are going to talk.”

“I’m sure.”

That winter Galileo’s illnesses struck him worse than ever, and he stayed in bed for months, often writhing and moaning. Sometimes he shouted furiously, others he shuddered epileptically, or spoke in Latin as if in conversation with someone invisible, sounding engaged and curious, surprised, humble, even supplicatory—all tones his voice never contained when he spoke to the living, when he was always so peremptory and sure.

“He speaks with the angels,” the servant Salvadore ventured. The boy was often too frightened to go into his room. Giuseppe thought it was funny.

“He just doesn’t want to work,” La Piera muttered. She would barge in no matter his state, and demand that he eat, that he drink tea, that he lay off the wine. When he was conscious of her presence he would curse her, his voice hoarse and dry. “You sound just like my mother. My mother in the disgusting form of a cook shaped like a cannonball.”

“Now who sounds like your mother? Drink something or die whining.”

“Fuck off. Leave me. Leave the drink and go. I had a real life once! I got to speak with real people! Now here I am, trapped with a bunch of pigs.”

Some days he sat upright in bed and wrote feverishly, page after page. The things he said and wrote got stranger and stranger. In a letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, he changed the subject abruptly and wrote:

The open book of heaven contains such profound mysteries and such sublime concepts that the labor and studies of hundreds of the sharpest minds, in uninterrupted investigation for thousands of years, have not yet completely fathomed them. This idea haunts me.

Another time he got up from bed, where he had been only semiconscious, and went to his table saying: “Pardon me, I need to get this down,” in a soothing voice none of us had ever heard before, and wrote a new page in a letter to a correspondent named Dini—a page that read like the Kepler he had always laughed at:

I have already discovered a constant generation on the solar body of dark substances, which appear to the eye as very black spots which then later are subsumed and dissolved, and I have discussed how they could perhaps be regarded as part of the nourishment (or perhaps its excrements) that some ancient philosophers thought the Sun needed for its sustenance. By constantly observing these dark substances, I have demonstrated how the solar body necessarily turns on itself, and I have also speculated how reasonable it is to believe that the motion of the planets around the Sun depends on such a motion—

After which he had returned to his bed and fallen comatose again. And there it was, in writing, him saying to a stranger that the sun was a living creature, eating and shitting, slinging the planets around itself by its rotation, like bangles extending from a top. Was this heresy, was it insanity? Could he not help himself? He had to know it was dangerous to commit such thoughts to print after Bellarmino’s warning, but he seemed helpless to stop himself, under the spell of a compulsion no one could comprehend. He only slept a few hours every night, and babbled in his sleep.

He pulled himself out of bed one morning and went out to collar Cartophilus. Rough hands at the ancient one’s neck: “Get out your teletrasporta, old man. I need to get back up there to Hera. Now.”

Cartophilus had no choice but to obey, but he didn’t like it. “This is a bad idea, maestro. You need to have the other end ready to receive you.”

“Do it anyway. Something’s wrong. Maybe up there too, but definitely here. Something’s wrong in my mind.”

Cartophilus went to the closet where he slept and came back with the small but heavy pewter box that had replaced Ganymede’s telescope some years before. He worked at its knobs for a time, muttering unhappily. “Get next to it,” he said.

Galileo sat next to the box, swallowing involuntarily. Where would she be now? What if the teletrasporta was at the bottom of a lake of liquid rock?

Nothing happened. “Come on,” Galileo said.

“I’m trying.” Cartophilus shook his head. “There’s no response. It isn’t reaching the other resonance box. I wonder if she disabled it.”

“I wonder if it sank into the lava,” Galileo said. “And her too.” He shuddered. “I need to go back! There’s something wrong here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I … When I was there last, I got a mathematics tutorial from Aurora, do you know her? No? A wonderful mathematician, and she and her machines were teaching me. They immerse you in the mathematics itself, it’s like flying. You have done it?”

Cartophilus shook his head.

“Well, you should. But I saw they had immersions that teach you about the mathematicians of the past, so that for instance you could go see, or even inhabit, Archimedes, and Euclid, and Archytas, and there was one for me. And so I took it. I took that immersion. I was just curious to see what they would say about me. But it wasn’t what I thought. It was more than a biography. You lived it, but all at once too. I saw my life! They had recorded it!”

Cartophilus sighed. “When they first made the entanglers, they did a lot of things, for years and years. Event engineering, mnemostics, all that. It took a while before people turned against them.”

“Well, I can see why they did.” Another shudder. “I saw too much. It wasn’t just learning a—a bad fate, off in the distance. It was … everything.”

“Why didn’t you stop it?”

“I did! But not before I saw too much. Now I know what will happen. I mean, day by day. I’m sure I know all of it, but I can’t quite bring it to mind until it happens. But it bulks there behind every moment, every thought.” His grip on Cartophilus’s arm was like an iron clamp. “While I was up there, it didn’t seem to matter. Now it does.”

“So do something different,” Cartophilus suggested.

He almost lost his arm for it, Galileo clutched him so. “I’ve tried,” Galileo moaned, “but it doesn’t work. The different thing is what I already did. I follow myself as if from a couple of steps behind. It’s horrible.”

“Like a Rückgriffe?”

“What’s that?”

“That’s German for something like ‘retroceptions.’”

Galileo shook his head. “It’s more like foresight.”

“Syndetos means bound together, so an asyndeton is when the connections between things go away. The French call that jamais vu.”

“No. I am all too connected.”

“Déjà vu, then. The French have a whole system. Already seen.”

“Yes. That would be one way to say it. Although it isn’t seeing so much as feeling. Already felt. Always already. Here—try Hera again. Get me there.”

Cartophilus attended to his device. “There’s still no response,” he said after a while. “She may be busy with other matters. Let’s try it again later, maestro. You’re killing my arm.”

Galileo let him go and slumped down beside him, bereft. “Damn. I hope she’s all right.” He heaved a big sigh. “This will kill me faster than anything.”

We all have seven secret lives. The life of excretion; the world of inappropriate sexual fantasies; our real hopes; our terror of death; our experience of shame; the world of pain; and our dreams. No one else ever knows these lives. Consciousness is solitary. Each person lives in that bubble universe that rests under the skull, alone.

Galileo struggled on with his new sickness, his ability that was a disability, alone.

Some of his friends were like La Piera, and wondered if his illnesses were not perhaps a little too convenient. For the fact was, in the first months of 1619 more comets had appeared in the night skies, alarming everyone. For a while no one spoke of anything else, and the unearthly phenomena filled all the horoscopes and the pages of the Avvisi. Of course all the astronomers and philosophers had to weigh in with an opinion on these new apparitions, and naturally, as before, everyone waited to hear what the notorious astronomer of the Medicis would say about them.

But the Dominicans were watching, the Jesuits were listening; everything he wrote or said would eventually get reported to the Holy Office of the Index, and to the Holy Congregation. As with the comets that had shown up a few years previously, it was not obvious if or how they might fit into either the Ptolemaic or Copernican cosmologies—but they were undeniably in the sky. How convenient, then (everyone said), that Galileo was so sick he could not even go out on his terrace in the evening and take a look! Galileo, the greatest astronomer in the world! What a chicken!

Silence from Bellosguardo.

Life limped along, day after tumbled day. Galileo had never looked so ill before. “Everything has already happened,” he would complain, surveying his visitors as if they were all new acquaintances. “Everything is happening for the second time. Or perhaps for the millionth time, or simply infinitely.” Or he would insist, even to strangers: “I am out of phase. I am living in the wrong potential time. She sent me back to the wrong self. It’s an interference pattern, the one where the two equal waves cancel each other out! That’s what’s happening to me! I’m not really here.”

A letter was going to come from Maria Celeste. It came, and as he had always done, he took out the little stiletto he used as a letter opener and watched himself cut the wax of the seal neatly away. He had unfolded it in just the way he unfolded it, and he read what he had read. Of the candied citron which you ordered, I have only been able to make a small quantity. I feared the citrons were too shriveled for preserving, and so it has proved. I send two baked pears for these days of vigil. He tasted the fruit he had been going to taste, and it tasted the way it was going to taste when he tasted it. It had an underlying bitterness, as with all his life. But she was also going to have put a rose in the basket, as he saw when he saw them. But as the greatest treat of all I send you a rose, which ought to please you extremely, seeing what a rarity it is at this season.

Indeed the time was out of joint, things blooming out of season. Really there was nothing but asynchronous anachronism. Time was a manifold full of exclusions and resurrections, fragments and the spaces between fragments, eclipses and epilepsies, isotopies all superposed on one another and interweaving in an anarchic vibrating tapestry. And since to relive it at one point was not to relive it at another, the whole was unreadable, permanently beyond the mind. The present was a laminate event, and obviously the isotopies could detach from each other, slightly or greatly. He was caught in a mere splinter of the whole, no matter how entangled with the rest of it. Caught in what his poor brilliant daughter called the darkness of this short winter of our mortal life, the words of her letter jumping off the page, the phrase something he had always read, like a prayer said every night of his life. Each moment reiterated. The darkness of this short winter of our mortal life.

He followed himself out into the garden. The world became as it was as it was. The day would be what it had always been. Sun struck the back of his neck. The great Saint Augustine had also felt this pseudoiterative feeling, he would notice in his desperate reading. Had the deepest of all the Christian philosophers also had an encounter with the stranger? No one else Galileo knew had ever written about time the way Augustine did:

Which way soever then this secret fore-perceiving of things to come, be; that only can be seen, which is. But what now is, is not future, but present. When then things to come are said to be seen, it is not themselves, which as yet are not, (that is, which are to be) it is rather their causes perchance or their signs that are seen, which already are. Therefore they are not future but present to those who now see that from which the future, being fore-conceived in the mind, is foretold. Which fore-conceptions again now are; and those who foretell those things, do behold the conceptions present before them.

That was right there in The Confessions, Book XI. Augustine made no conclusions in the long feverish chapter that held his meditation on time, but only confessed to his own confusion. Of course he was confused, and so was Galileo. These thoughts had always been there, and now he read them just after they generated themselves spontaneously in his head. It gave him a headache to read like that.

But in the garden he would sit still, and think. It was possible, there, to collapse all the potentialities to a single present. This moment had a long duration. Such a blessing; he could feel it in his body, in the sun and air and earth sustaining him. Blue sky overhead—it was the part of the rainbow that was always visible, stretching all the way across the dome of sky. Sitting there, he knew he would go back inside and eat, and try to write to Castelli. He was going to shit without shitting his guts out his second asshole. It was going to hurt. He would be standing at the edge of his field at sunset, watching the last light burnish the tops of the ripe barley, praying for the consolation of the sky. There was nothing for it but to pace through just behind or ahead of the spooling present that was never there, caught in the nonexistent interval between the nonexistent past and the nonexistent future. He would precede and follow his own footsteps. It would happen later, as he had already seen. It had already happened, as he would see later. Finally, one spring morning just after sunrise, Galileo roared furiously from his bedroom. What inspired his defiance of the pseudoiterative no one knew, and to him it was still just a matter of obeying the compulsion of the now; but after the trembling happy boys had helped him to dress, cringing at his every move, each of which looked like the start of a blow, which they would have welcomed to see even as they dodged, he hobbled out to the narrow terrace that overlooked Florence in the valley below them to the north. Down there the Duomo stood above the sea of tile rooftops like something from a different world, bigger and more geometrical. Like a little moon come down to earth, or like the clouds rafting over it.

Over his shoulder he growled to La Piera, “Bring me breakfast. Then have the boys move my desk out here. No doubt I have letters to catch up on. I’ll just have to follow myself out there and work through it. Hopefully it will feel like being a scribe making copies. Someone else can do the thinking.”

Everyone in Bellosguardo ignored his grousing, pleased by his actions. The maestro had returned to life—surly life, it was true, ill-tempered, whining life—but better than the miserable limbo of the winter. He would spend much of the next few weeks writing fifteen or twenty letters a day; it always happened that way when he snapped out of his funks. He was sick so often that even his recovery period was a ritual they all knew.

“Send me Cartophilus,” he said to La Piera, when she brought out food and wine at the end of a long day of scribbling and cursing.

When he had finished eating, staring at each biscuit and capon leg as if it were entirely new to him, the ancient servant stood before him.

Galileo surveyed him wearily. “Tell me more about déjà vu.”

“There isn’t much to say. It’s a French term, obviously. The French language has always been very analytical and precise about mental states, and they will work out these terms. Déjà vu is the feeling something has happened before. Presque vu is the feeling that you almost understand something, usually something important, but you don’t quite.”

“I feel that all the time.”

“But mystically, I mean. A really big existential tip of the tongue moment.”

“Pretty often, even so. I feel like that pretty often.”

“And then jamais vu is a sudden loss of comprehension of anything, even just the ordinary day.”

“I’ve felt that too,” Galileo said thoughtfully. “I’ve felt all of those.”

“Yes. We all do. When some French were assembling an encyclopedia of paranormal experiences, they decided to leave déjà vu out, because it was so common it could not be considered paranormal.”

“That’s for sure. Right now I am stuck in it all the time.”

Cartophilus nodded. “Why didn’t she give you the amnestics when she returned you?”

“There wasn’t time! I barely got out of there alive. I told you, I need to go back. Hera’s in trouble. They all are. They need an outside force to arbitrate.”

“I can’t do it without them doing their part at their end. You know.”

“I don’t know. I want you to get me back. I can’t stand this, it’s like torture. It will kill me.”

“Soon,” the old man said. “Not right now. I’ll ask again, but there hasn’t been a response. It may be some while. But that won’t matter in the end, if you see what I mean.”

Galileo glared at him. “I don’t, actually.”

Cartophilus picked up an emptied platter. “You will, maestro. You will or you won’t, but nothing to be done about it now.” And he slunk away in his usual craven manner.

The latest letter from Maria Celeste had come. He will open it.

You having let the days go by, Sire, without coming to visit us, is enough to provoke some fear in me that the great love you have always shown us may be diminishing somewhat. I am inclined to believe that you keep putting off the visit because of the little satisfaction you derive from coming here, not only because the two of us, in what I suppose I would call our ineptitude, simply do not know how to show you a better time, but also because the other nuns, for other reasons, cannot keep you sufficiently amused.

“Get some food on the mule,” Galileo had snapped at the boys. “Be ready in an hour. Go.”

Galileo had long since beaten a path of his own over the hilltops between Bellosguardo and the convent of San Matteo in Arcetri. Every time he walked or rode over, he took a basket of the food he grew in Bellosguardo’s extensive gardens. For the sake of the nuns he had shifted the focus of his gardening to staple crops, so on this morning the mule was loaded down with bags of beans, lentils, wheat, and garbanzos; also zucchini, and the first of the gourds. He would add a bouquet of lupines he found in bloom around the borders of the piazza. Already it was well into spring; he had missed a lot of the year.

This morning was one he had very definitely lived before: the mule, the hills, the boys ahead, Cartophilus behind, all under whatever sky the day might bring. Today it would be high clouds like carded wool. The previous fall he and Maria Celeste had begun collaborating on jellies and candied fruits, so that both establishments might have some variety and pleasure in their diet; so hanging from the mule also was a bag of citrons, lemons, and oranges. They still looked like little Ios to him.

On the way Cartophilus would keep well behind, and it was too nice a morning for Galileo to want to talk to him anyway. May hills were green under a silver sky. They would be arriving at San Matteo just after midday. Convent rules forbade outsiders to go into most of the buildings, and the nuns were forbidden from going outside; supposedly they were required to have a screen to be set between them and any visitors. But over the years the screen had slowly shrunk to a waist-high barrier, and finally been dispensed with altogether, so that Galileo and his daughter could embrace, and then sit side by side in the doorway looking out at the lane, Maria Celeste holding him by the hand.

These days she was even thinner than she had been as a girl, but she was still bright and outgoing, and obviously attached to her father, who served as a kind of patron saint for her. Livia, now Suor Arcangela, on the other hand, was more withdrawn and sullen than ever, and never came out of the dormitory to see Galileo. From reports it appeared she was uninterested in anything but food, which was a bad sole interest for a Clare to have.

Maria Celeste, whom he persisted in thinking of as Virginia, today would be overjoyed to see him again. She would inquire repeatedly about his health, and seem surprised when he did not want to discuss it. He would see that this was one of the only subjects of conversation in the convent, perhaps the principal one. How they felt. How they were too hot or too cold, and always, how they were hungry. He would have to bring bigger baskets of food. He had given up trying to slip his daughters gifts he could not give to the other nuns; Maria Celeste felt it was wrong. So if he wanted to help her and Arcangela, he would have to help all of them. But that he couldn’t afford.

They had talked as they ate a dinner together with the abbess, then it was time to go, if they were to get back to Bellosguardo in the light.

On the mule on the way back he would be silent, as usual. He had the grim look he always had when thinking about family or money; perhaps the two simply went together. His annual retainer from the Medicis was a thousand crowns, more than the grand duke paid anyone except his secretary and his generals, and yet still it wasn’t enough. His expenses continued to mount. And much of it had to do with family. He supported the old gargoyle, of course. His sister Livia, who had left the convent she had entered in order to get married, had been unable to keep her odious husband Landucci from abandoning her. And this was after he had sued Galileo for nonpayment of what was really Galileo’s brother’s part of her dowry. Livia had come to Galileo for shelter, then died while he was in Rome; died of a broken heart, the servants said. Now Galileo had the care of her children. And Landucci was suing yet again for nonpayment of Michelangelo’s portion of the dowry—talk about déjà vu—even though he had left the marriage and the abandoned wife was dead, and Cosimo had given Galileo a dispensation. Meanwhile Galileo’s invertebrate brother had sent his own wife and seven kids to Galileo while he stayed in Munich and continued trying to make a living as a musician. That was family.

So even though Galileo was no longer teaching, and took in no student boarders, the household in Bellosguardo consisted of about the same number of people it had had in Padua, where people had often called the big house on Via Vignali the Hostel Galileo. Roughly forty people, he didn’t even bother to keep count anymore. La Piera kept the house accounts, and very capably. She always gave him the bad news with a straight face. They were running at a loss. Galileo had definitely lived these things before. And no one had ever bought a celatone, or ever would. And the ones he had given away, in hope of creating orders, had been expensive to manufacture.

A bad time came to Tuscany—years of plague, years of death. Sagredo asked him to think about a telescope for looking at things close up, to see more clearly objects like paintings and Cellini’s medallions, and Galileo and Mazzoleni worked up a thick rectangular lens, convex on both sides, which worked admirably, and which gave Galileo ideas for a compound lens system that might work even better. But then word came that Sagredo had died, with no warning and very little illness. The shock of it was like a sword thrust to Galileo’s heart; his knees buckled when he heard it. Giovanfrancesco, his big brother, gone.

Then his mother Giulia died, in September of 1620, after eighty-two years of making everyone in her life miserable. Galileo made all the arrangements for the funeral, he emptied and sold her house, he dispersed the money to his sisters and his hapless brother, all without a word or a sign, staring grimly at the walls as the furniture and goods left the place, revealing it to be pitifully small. For a long time it had been a comfort to him to realize that his mother was insane, and had been for the entirety of his life. But not now. She was angry. She was a person just like you, just as smart as you. She wanted what anyone would want. Everyone is equally proud. In one of her cabinets at the bottom of a mass of papers, he found two glass lenses, one concave and one convex.

Then Cardinal Bellarmino died, leaving no one alive who knew exactly what had passed between him and Galileo in the crucial meetings of 1616.

Then Grand Duke Cosimo died, after many years of illness: Galileo’s patron, gone at age thirty. This was the kind of disaster his Venetian friends had warned him against, when he had opted for Florence’s patronage over Venice’s employment.

But Cosimo’s heir, Ferdinando II, only ten years old, was put under the regency of his grandmother, the Grand Duchess Christina, and his mother, the Archduchess Maria Maddelena. In Christina, Galileo still had his patron, which was a very lucky thing. She took up his offer to tutor the new prince as he once had his father, and on they went, Galileo and his Medicean Stars. But this particular arrangement did not lead to much time with the boy, and when Galileo did meet with him he found it a very melancholy thing—instructing and entertaining a sweet little boy of ten, who so resembled his father at the same age that it was uncanny to experience, like living a loop in time. Another way his life was repeating itself, although he himself grew older at every repetition. A particularly dark kind of déjà vu. He walked in his own footsteps.

Then Marina died. When the maestro got the news from Padua, he sat out on the terrace of Bellosguardo all night long, a fiasco of wine at his side. The telescope was set up, but he did not look through it.

More than once that night, he recalled the time the two women had fought so furiously, and he had stood there holding them apart. How these things stick in the mind. Everyone is equally proud. Now when he relived that scene he held them apart with his heart full of an anguished affection. They had been strong people. He had been crucified between two harpies. He could even for once see the comedy of that ridiculous scene. No doubt the servants had laughed about it for years afterward. Now he laughed himself, full of remorse and love.

Then Pope Paul V died. The cardinals gathered in Rome, and could not agree on a successor; in the end they elected an obvious placeholder, Alessandro Ludovisi, an old man who chose the name Gregory XV. No one had any expectations of him, but as soon as he was invested he named two Lynceans to secretarial posts, an excellent sign, possibly a portent of things to come. Certainly Cesi was pleased. But for the most part everyone waited for the next puff of white smoke to tell them who would really shape the next period in their lives.

Meanwhile Galileo continued to work desultorily, in a daze of regretful expectation. He took on various studies: what could be seen through a microscope; magnetism again; the strength of materials again; even, since he had Mazzoleni there, a return to some of his old work on the inclined planes, trying to recapture that magic. He wrote letters to his ex-students, and looked for new ways to supplement his income. Every week, sometimes more often, he visited his daughters at San Matteo, riding the old mule over the track he had beaten into the hills. They were suffering there; he always came home distressed at their threadbare hunger.

“In this world a vow of poverty is going too far!” he would complain to La Piera. “They would be poor even if they took a vow to prosper! Make up another basket for them and send it with the boys.”

He had changed his gardening practices even more drastically, and the new crops made it more a farm than ever. He grew beans, garbanzos, lentils, and wheat. And in a big oven, built under Mazzoleni’s supervision, they were now baking bread, and cooking big pots of soup and casseroles to strap to the mule and take over to the sisters. Also sacks and bushels of uncooked beans and grain. Still, there was no way he could grow enough to feed all thirty of the sisters of San Matteo. They were the thinnest group of nuns he had ever seen, although all nuns were thin. And Maria Celeste was the thinnest of them all.

He gave no lectures to the Florentine court. He wrote no books. He contrived no tests or demonstrations. He did not even want to go to Venice for Carnivale; he claimed now that he had never liked Carnivale, which was odd, because everyone could remember how much he had enjoyed it in the old days, how much he had loved any party or festival. Some in the house joked that now he understood it marked the beginning of Lent, which he had definitely never liked; others said it was because it reminded him too much of his iron truss. In any case, now he looked confused, even alarmed, whenever Carnivale was mentioned.

One night, unable to sleep, he sat out on the piazza looking through a telescope at Saturn. Jupiter was not in the sky. Saturn seemed to be some kind of triple star, oddly wide and shimmering, not with fulgurous rays but with bulbous articulations that made it look like a head with ears. He had seen that first in 1612, then watched the ears go away over the years, and Saturn become a sphere like Jupiter. Now the ears had reappeared, and he could write to Castelli that he should expect to see them in full in 1626. They were not there yet, but on the way. It was an odd thing.

But the heaviness in Galileo did not allow him to vibrate to this sight in his usual way, much less to ring. It had been many years since he had rung like a bell at the discovery of some new thing. And really, the objects seen through the telescope had been disenchanted for him by all that he had seen in his proleptic visitations to Jupiter. People would inhabit the stars and yet remain as petty and stupid and contentious as ever—all the vices fully active, in fact, still writhing as lustily as ever in their vicious ways. It was horrible.

He would pick up his lute and pluck a tune of his father’s that he called “Desolation.” His father, so quiet and withdrawn. Well, imagine what it must have been like, living with Giulia all those years. No matter how valid the causes, she had not been sane. Later the mnemosynes would help the insane, and peoples’ characters in general would be smoothed by society as if on a lathe, but in his time they were hacked out by chisels and hatchets, and crazy people were really crazy. If you lived with one, you had to withdraw somehow. But no one could truly disappear. Some parts remained in the world. And so this tune, the saddest he had ever heard. His old man, sitting there at the table looking down as the old rolling pin pounded him. Sometimes Vincenzio would try to argue with her, first reasonably, then snapping and shouting like she did, but always at half speed compared to her. His thought was adagio, while her thought and tongue were always presto agitato. Not that he had been unintelligent, rather the reverse; he had been a fine musician and composer, and one of the deepest experts ever in the theory and philosophy of music, having written books on the subject admired all over Italy. And yet in his own household the nightly debates revealed him mostly cruelly to be only the second smartest person in the house—and really, after Galileo reached about the age of five, the third. It must have been disheartening. And so he had died. Without your heart you died. This late tune of his was a kind of last confession, a shriving, a testament. A remaining thought of his, still alive in this world.

In the shadows under the arcade there was a movement. Somebody up and about, skulking.

“Cartophilus!”

“Maestro.”

“Come here.”

The ancient one shuffled out. “What can I get you, maestro?”

“Answers, Cartophilus. Sit down beside me. Why are you up so late?”

“Had to pee. Is that the answer you wanted?”

Galileo’s chuckle was a low “Huh huh huh,” like the huffing of a boar. “No,” he said. “Sit down.” He handed the old man the jug of wine. “Drink.”

Cartophilus had already been drinking, as became clear when he abruptly collapsed on one of Galileo’s big pillows, groaning as he folded into a tailor’s position. He rolled the jug over his bent elbow and took a long pull.

“How old are you, Cartophilus?”

Another groan. “How can I tell, maestro? You know how it is.”

“How many years have you been alive, that’s all.”

“Something like four hundred.”

Galileo whistled low. “That’s old.”

Cartophilus nodded. “Don’t I know it.” He drank again.

“How old do you people live?”

“It isn’t certain, as far as I know. I think the oldest people are about six or seven hundred. But they’re still going.”

“And how long have you been here in Europe, with the tele-trasporta?”

“Since 1409.”

“That long!” Galileo stared at him. “Where was it that you appeared? Did you come with the first arrival of the thing? And how did it get here, when it was not here to bring it?”

The old man put up a hand. “Do you know about the Gypsies?”

“Of course. They are supposed to be wandering Egyptians, as you are supposed to be the Wandering Jew. They come into towns and steal things.”

“Exactly. Except really they came from India, by way of Persia. The Zott, the tsigani, the zegeuner, the Romani, et cetera. Anyway, we pretended to be a tribe of them, in Hungary in 1409. We were the ones who started what the Gypsies call o xonxano baro, the great trick. In those days, there was a different attitude toward penitents. We found we could go from town to town and say that we were nobles of lesser Egypt who had briefly fallen into paganism and then reconverted to Christianity, and as a penance we were to wander homelessly and beg strangers for help. We could even say we had accidentally offended Christ Himself and so were forced to wander forever after, asking for alms, and that worked just as well. We also had a letter of recommendation from Sigismund, King of the Romans, asking people to take us in and treat us kindly. Thus the Romani. And we could tell fortunes with startling accuracy, as you might imagine. So the tricks worked everywhere we went. We could say anything. Sometimes we told them that we had been ordered to wander for seven years, and during those years we were allowed to thieve without being liable to punishment for it. Even that worked. People were credulous.” He laughed a mirthless laugh.

“And you had the teletrasporta with you the whole time?”

“Yes. Ganymede was with it as well, visiting it off and on. He had tried all this before, you see. He made an earlier analeptic introjection, trying to get the ancient Greeks to develop science to the point of igniting a technological revolution very much earlier in the human story.”

“Aha!” Galileo said. “Archimedes.”

“Yes, that’s right. He even showed him a laser—”

“—the mirror that could burn things at a distance!”

“Yes, that’s right. But it didn’t work. The analepsis, I mean. It was too anachronistic; there was no way to build the culture around the knowledge. Ganymede found out that the manifold is not so easily changed—to the despair of some of us, and the great relief of others, as you might imagine.”

“I should think so! What if he had changed you all right out of existence? You might have disappeared on the spot!”

“Well, maybe so. But how would that be any different from the way it is now? People disappear all the time.”

“Hmm,” Galileo said.

“Anyway, judging by a kind of tautology, since we existed, we didn’t think it could happen. And the manifold of manifolds doesn’t really work like that. I am not competent to speak to the physics involved, but I think I catch a glimpse of it in the analogy of the river mouth, with braiding channels, each one of which is a kind of reality, or a potentiality.”

“That’s the one Aurora told me about.”

“It’s a common image. You have your three or four or ten billion currents running concurrently, and tides running back upstream, and the riverbeds themselves all shifting in the force of the various flows. Some water goes upstream, some downstream, the banks get eroded, there’s cross-chop on the surface, and so on. Some streambeds go dry and get oxbowed, while new ones are carved.”

“Like at the mouth of the Po.”

“I’m sure. So, Ganymede thought he could kick a riverbank so hard that the subsequent erosion would carve an entirely new river downstream, if you see what I mean. But it isn’t like that. There’s a bigger topography somehow. And a single kick …”

He took another drink of wine, wiped his mouth. “In any case, it didn’t work. Archimedes—he got killed. And all that was lost. Even that device, that teletrasporta, to use your word for it.”

“Please do. It’s better than entangler—I mean, everything is already entangled, so that’s not what the device is doing.”

Cartophilus actually smiled at this. “You may be right. Whatever you call it, there’s one of them on the bottom of the Aegean, near An-tikytherae. It’s likely to last a long time, too. It was disguised to look like an Olympic calendar, but that won’t be enough to explain it if it’s ever found.”

“How did Ganymede get back to Jupiter?”

“He returned at the last moment before his ship sank, determined to try again. He’s a stubborn man, and the nature of analepsis makes it possible to try over and over. He decided he needed more time to prepare, to help on the scene. He read intensively in the historical record, and visited various resonant times, and decided you were his best chance to make a significant change in the disaster centuries that follow you. But he wanted to visit Copernicus too, and Kepler.”

“So you came back as Gypsies.”

“Exactly. With a different teletrasporta, probably the last one. I doubt they will send back any more.”

“That’s what Hera said, but why not?”

“Well, results have been uncertain, or bad. And there are philosophical objections to that kind of tampering. We are all entangled always, as you said, but introjections are a kind of assault on another part of time, according to some people. It’s been controversial from the start. Also, the energy requirements to actually move a device in the antichronos dimension are prohibitive.” He shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

“I might. I had quite a tutorial last time I was up there.”

“Well, you know how Jupiter is a gas giant, and Saturn is another, also Uranus and Neptune and Hades. Five gas giants.”

“Yes?”

“Well, before the analepses that sent back the devices, there were seven gas giants. Cronus and Nyx were farther out—so far out that their gravitational effect on the other planets was not crucial to the inner orbits. People argued against destroying them, but the interventionists did it anyway. They needed the power. Ganymede was part of that too. Black holes were created that sucked gas in, and the collapse energy was used to push everything in a small field antichronologically After a device was back here, it was possible to shift consciousness back and forth with hardly any energy expended. Its more a case of just stepping into the complementary field.”

“And how many teletrasportas were sent back?”

“Something like six or seven.”

“And so you came back with this one, to be a Gypsy.”

“Yes.” Cartophilus heaved a big drunken sigh. “I thought I could do some good. I was an idiot.”

“Don’t you ever want to go back?” Galileo asked. “Couldn’t you go back?”

“I don’t know. Even Ganymede has gone back for good, have you noticed? He’s done what he wanted to do here. Or decided the situation at home is so important he needs to be there. Everyone else was already gone. It’s hard to stay here.” He stopped speaking for a while, took another slug. “I don’t know,” he muttered finally. “Cartophilus can always leave if he wants to.”

“Cartophilus? You speak of someone else?”

The ancient one gestured weakly. “Cartophilus is just a … performance. No one is really there. One tries not to be there. Only four dimensions out of ten—it’s not so much.”

Galileo, startled, looked at him closely. “But what sadness this sounds like! What guilt!”

“Yes. A crime.”

“Well,” Galileo said. “Still, it must be in the past. Now is now.”

“But the crime goes on. All I can do now is … deal with it.”

Galileo’s eyes narrowed. “Do you know what happens to me? Are you trying to make it happen? Have you already made it happen?”

The old man raised his hand like a beggar warding off a blow. “I’m not trying anything, maestro. Truly. I’m just here. I don’t know what I should do. Do you?”

“No.”

“Does anybody?”

All Galileo’s friends, and the Linceans especially, wanted him to reply to the attacks that had been made on him in the work on the comets published under the name Sarsi, which everyone told him was a pseudonym for the Jesuit Orazio Grassi. Galileo had avoided writing this response for a long time, feeling there was nothing to be gained by it, and much to be lost. Even now he was unwilling to venture it, and complaining about the situation. But with Paul V gone, and Bellarmino also gone, Galileo’s friends in Rome were convinced that a new opportunity lay before them. And Galileo was their Achilles in the ongoing war with the Jesuits.

Mostly Galileo ignored these pleas for action, but a letter from Virginio Cesarini, a young aristocrat he had met at the Academy of Lynxes the last time he was in Rome, caused him to laugh, then groan. Knowing you has marvelously inflamed in me a desire to know something. This was the laugh. What happened to me in listening to you was what happens to men bitten by little animals, who do not yet feel the pain in the act of being stung, and only after the puncture become aware of the damage received. This was the groan. “Now I’m a wasp,” Galileo groused. “I’m the mosquito of philosophy.”

I saw after your discourse that I have a somewhat philosophical mind.

The strange thing was, he did. Typically people were quite wrong when they felt they were philosophical, as one of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself. But Cesarini turned out to be quite a brilliant youth, sickly but serious, melancholy but intelligent. And so, if he too was writing to ask Galileo to write about the comets, adding his aristocratic position and wealth to the influence of Cesi, Galileo’s best advocate in Rome …

“God damn it.”

This was in the workshop. Mazzoleni regarded him with his cracked grin. He had heard all about it, a thousand times or more. “Why not just do it, boss?”

Galileo heaved a sigh. “I’m under a prohibition, Mazzo. Besides, I’m sick of it. All these questions from the nobility. They never stop, but to them it’s just a game. It’s banquet entertainment, you understand? Why do things float or sink? What are tides? What are sunspots? How should I know? These are impossible questions. And when you try to answer them, you can’t help but run afoul of fucking Aristotle, and thus the Jesuits and the rest of the dogs. And yet really we don’t know enough to say one way or the other. You know what it’s like—we can barely figure out how fast a ball rolls down a table! So answering these silly people’s questions just gets me in trouble.”

“But you have to do it.”

“Yes.” Galileo gave him a sharp look. “It’s my job, you mean, as court philosopher.”

“Yes. Isn’t that right?”

“I suppose it is.”

“You thought when you stopped teaching in Padua, you would be able to do anything you wanted.”

“I suppose so.”

“No one gets that, maestro.”

Another sharp look. “You impertinent old fool. I’ll send you back to the Arsenale.”

“I wish.”

“Go away or I’ll beat you. In fact, go get me Guiducci and Ar-righetti. I’ll beat them.”

These two young men, private students he had taken on as a favor to Grand Duchess Christina, joined him in the workshop where his crew had made the celatones. He showed the two youths his old folios, filled with the notes and theorems from all his work on motion in Padua. “I want you to make fair copies of these,” he told them. “We worked fast back then, and we didn’t have much paper. See, there are often several propositions per page, and on both sides. What I want you to do is move each proposition or set of calculations onto a single sheet, using one side only. If you have any questions as to what’s what, ask me. When you’re done then maybe we can make some progress on all this.”

At the same time, however, despite his fears and premonitions, his near certainty that it was a bad idea, he watched himself begin to write a treatise on the controversy concerning the comets.

Now the truth was, as he would explain in conversation when friends visited Bellosguardo, he really had been sick, and had only observed the comets when they were visible once or twice, out of curiosity. So he did not know what they were, and probably would not have known even if he had observed them more. He could only offer suppositions based on what he had heard. So on the one hand as he wrote he questioned the whole basis of the phenomenon, and wondered if a comet was merely sunlight on a disturbance in the upper atmosphere, like a night rainbow. And then also he suggested, with his usual edge, that whatever it was, it certainly did not fit any of Aristotle’s celestial categories. Along the way he could make fun of “Sarsi’s” lame logic, for Grassi had made some real howlers attempting to explain what he had no grounds for understanding. And so, as Galileo sat on his high chair before his desk, writing in the shade on the terrace in the mornings, he would add observations and arguments that made for a defense of his method of observation and experiment, of mathematical explanations. Of avoiding the why of things, and concentrating first on the what and the how. Mornings spent writing about these matters were a good distraction from everything else, and the pages piled one on the next. Sometimes it was nice to just be following yourself through the motions of the day. It certainly made writing easier.

In Sarsi I seem to discern the firm belief that in philosophizing one must support oneself upon the opinion of some famous author, as if our minds remain sterile and barren unless wedded to the reasoning of some other person. Possibly he thinks that philosophy is a book of fiction by some writer, like The Iliad or Orlando Furioso—productions in which the least important thing is whether what is written there is true. Well, Sarsi, that is not how matters stand. Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and recognize the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is completely impossible to understand a single word of it. Without these, one wanders in a dark labyrinth.

While with these concepts, on the other hand—Galileo thought but did not write, looking at his words and feeling the bulk of futurity in him—with these concepts, the universe is blasted by a light, as if a great flash has exploded in your eyes. Everything is clear, all too clear, to the point of transparency, and one walks as if in a world of glass—seeing too far, running into things not quite noticed, the present moment just one abstraction among a host of others. Hera was right; no one should know more than his moment can hold. The future inside you pushes for its release, and the pain of living with that canker is like no other pain.

There was no recourse but to try to forget. He became expert at forgetting. As part of the work of that forgetting, he wrote. To write was to live in the moment, and say what one could there, put it down and forget it, letting the rest fall away.

Once again he told the story of how he had first learned of the telescope.

In Venice, where I happened to be at the time, news arrived that a Fleming had presented to Count Maurice a glass by means of which distant objects might be seen as distinctly as if they were nearby. That was all.

Well, not exactly; not at all, in fact. But he felt defensive about it. Someday people would know. But there was nothing for it, so he returned to the demolishing of the malevolent “Sarsi.”

There is no doubt whatsoever that by introducing irregular lines Sarsi may save not only the appearance being discussed, but any other. Lines are called regular when, having a fixed and definite description, they can be defined and can have their properties listed and demonstrated. Thus the spiral, or the ellipse. Irregular lines then are those which have no determinacy whatever, but are indefinite and casual and hence undefinable. No property of such lines can be demonstrated, and in a word, nothing can be known about them. Hence to say, “Such events take place thanks to an irregular path” is the same as to say, “I do not know why they occur.” The introduction of such supposed explanations is in no way superior to the “sympathy,” “antipathy,” “occult properties,” “influences,” and other terms employed by some philosophers as a cloak for the correct reply, which would be: “I don’t know.” That reply is as much more tolerable than the others, as candid honesty is more beautiful than deceitful duplicity.

But long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: The less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them; while on the other hand, to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.

While he was at work on this new treatise, Pope Gregory died, as expected. Galileo was not unlike many others in feeling this was foreordained and unsurprising, as if it had already happened. And over a long malarial summer, the convocation of cardinals would be held to decide on the new pope.

But this time, they couldn’t do it. They appeared to be truly deadlocked. Weeks passed, the maneuvering between the great families was intense but stalemated, and rumors in Rome and all over Italy flew like clouds of flies. It went on so long that six of the eldest cardinals died of exhaustion. Only late in August did the white puff of smoke emerge from the chimney in the Vatican.

The announcement was brought up to Bellosguardo in person by the Medici’s secretary Curzio Picchena, emerging from his coach onto the terrace resplendent in his best finery, his arms outspread, a big smile lighting his face.

“Barberini!” he exclaimed. “Maffeo Barberini!”

For once Galileo Galilei was speechless. His jaw dropped, his hand clapped over his open mouth. He glanced wild-eyed at Cartophilus, then threw his arms wide and howled. He hugged La Piera, who had come out with the other servants to see what was going on, and then he called the whole household to join the impromptu celebration. He fell to his knees, crossed himself, looked at the sky, dashed tears from his eyes.

Finally he rose and took Picchena by both hands.

“Barberini? Are you sure? Can it be true? Gracious Grandissimo Cardinal Maffeo Barberini?”

“The very same.”

It was astonishing. The new pope—that very cardinal who had written a poem in honor of Galileo’s astronomical discoveries of 1612; who had argued on Galileo’s side in the debate with Colombe over floating bodies; who had conspicuously stayed away from the proceedings of 1615 that had put Copernicus on the Index; above all, who had written Galileo a letter of regret when Galileo had been too sick to attend a leave-taking breakfast, signing it “Your Brother.” Urbane, worldly, intellectual, literary, liberal, handsome, young—he was only fifty-three, too young for a pope really, as Rome relied on a frequent turnover of popes—which was one reason no one had expected this outcome—but still, there it was. Pope Urban VIII, he had named himself.

Weak with amazement, with enormous, dizzying relief, Galileo called for wine. “Break open a new cask!” Geppo brought him a chair to sit on. “We have to celebrate!” But he was almost too weak to do so.

That night he woke Cartophilus and dragged him out to the telescope.

“What’s going on?” he demanded. “This is new. This didn’t happen before!”

“What do you mean?”

“You know—everything that has been happening this year, I’ve felt it as if it had already happened. It’s been hell. But this, Barberini becoming pope—it’s new! I had no premonition.”

“That’s strange,” Cartophilus said, thinking it over.

“What does it mean?”

Cartophilus shrugged. He met Galileo’s gaze. “I don’t know, maestro. I’m here with you, remember?”

“But did you not know what happened, before you came back as a Gypsy? Don’t you remember this or not remember this?”

“I don’t remember if I remember right or not, anymore. It’s been too long.”

Galileo growled, and raised his hand to cuff the man. “You lie.”

“Not at all, maestro! Don’t hit me. I just don’t know. It’s been too long.”

“But you came to me with the Ganymede, you stay with me and watch me, you don’t go back to Jupiter—and you say you don’t know?” He bunched his fist.

“I stay here because I have nowhere else. Cartophilus has to play his part. And now I’m used to it. I like it. It’s home. The sun, the wind, the trees and birds—you know. This is a real place. You can sit in the dirt. You yourself have noticed how removed they are up there. I don’t think I can go back to that. So, I’m stuck. I have nowhere that is really mine.”

They stared at each other in the darkness. Galileo let his arm fall.

Everything now changed. The Linceans were overjoyed at the opportunity that this new pope represented, what they called a mirabile congiunture. They begged Galileo to finish his treatise, which he was now calling Il Saggiatore. It was the word used to describe those who weighed gold and other valuables—The Assayer—but Galileo meant more than that by it, hoping to suggest the kind of weighing done by those who put all nature on the balance, like Archimedes. The Experimenter, one might say, or The Scientist.

But The Assayer too, sure. In this case, he was weighing Sarsi’s Jesuitical arguments, and finding them wanting. Knowing Pope Urban VIII would be one of the readers of his book—its ultimate reader, its recipient, one might say—he began to write in a more literary and playful style, pastiching the pope’s own liberal writing. He considered what he loved in Ariosto, and took pains to do similar things. He had long since understood that all these debates were a kind of theater, after all.

If Sarsi wants me to believe with Suidas that the Babylonians cooked their eggs by whirling them around in slings, I will do it, but I must add that the cause of this cooking of the eggs was very different from what he suggests. To discover the true cause, I reason as follows: “If we do not achieve an effect which others formerly achieved, then it must be that in our operations we lack something that was part of their success. And if there is just one single thing we lack, then that alone can be the true cause. Now we do not lack eggs, nor slings, nor sturdy fellows to whirl them; yet our eggs do not cook, but merely cool down faster if they happen to be hot. And since nothing is lacking to us except being Babylonians, then being Babylonians is the cause of the hardening of the eggs, and not friction of the air.” And this is what I wished to discover. Is it possible that Sarsi has never observed the coolness produced on his face by the continual rush of air when he is riding post? If he has, then how can he prefer to believe things related by other men as having happened two thousand years ago in Babylon, rather than present events which he himself experiences?

Sarsi says he does not wish to be numbered among those who affront the sages by disbelieving or contradicting them. I say I do not wish to be counted as an ignoramus and an ingrate toward Nature and toward God. For if they have given me my senses and my reason, why should I defer such great gifts to the errors of some mere man? Why should I believe blindly and stupidly what I wish to believe, and subject the freedom of my intellect to someone else who is just as liable to error as I am?

Finally Sarsi is reduced to saying with Aristotle that if the air ever happened to be abundantly filled with warm exhalations in the presence of various other requisites, then leaden balls would melt in the air when shot from muskets or thrown by slings. This must have been the state of the air when the Babylonians were cooking their eggs. At such times things must go very pleasantly for people who are being shot at.

Ha ha! The Linceans laughed; they loved passages like this when Galileo sent them along for revision and approval. This was the first time Galileo had ever submitted drafts of a book to a committee of fellow philosophers, and though he found it frustrating, it was interesting as well. It was going to be a statement with the imprimatur of the Academy of Lynxes; it would have their backing, and with that it would enter the Roman intellectual wars, where the new was now battering the old into the ground. Cesi begged him to finish the book, and then come to Rome and rout the Jesuits utterly. Cesi would publish it in the name of the Linceans, and had already had the title page altered so that the book would now be dedicated to Urban VIII.

Good surprises kept happening. Cesarini was made an official member of the Academy of the Lynxes, and four days later the new pope made him a cardinal. So a Lincean was now a cardinal! And the pope also appointed his own nephew Francesco to be a cardinal—that very same Francesco whom Galileo had just helped to obtain a teaching position at the university in Padua!

Galileo began to believe Cesi: this was indeed a mirabile congiunture. It might even be possible to get Copernicus taken off the list. So he wrote more of his treatise every day. He sent letters to Cesi and the other Linceans, promising to finish the revisions they had suggested to him. Cesi had the publication scheduled in Rome. He urgently wanted Galileo to come to the capital. Galileo wanted it too. He made the request to Picchena to be allowed to go, and after some hesitations, Picchena and the Medici lady regents agreed to the plan. So preparations for another trip to Rome were made, and the book was almost finished.

Near the end of Il Saggiatore, the first book Galileo had published since the ban of 1615, he dispensed with the sarcastic attacks on Sarsi, and made some philosophical points that were new. These would come back to haunt him later:

I must consider what it is that we call heat, as I suspect that people in general have a concept of this which is very far from the truth. For they believe that heat is a real phenomenon, or property, or quality, which actually resides in the material by which we feel ourselves warmed. Now I say that whenever I conceive any material or corporeal substance, I immediately feel the need to think of it as bounded, and as having this or that shape, as being large or small in relation to other things, and in some specific place at any given time; as being in motion or at rest; as touching or not touching some other body; and as being one in number, or few, or many. From these conditions I cannot separate such a substance by any stretch of my imagination. But that it must be white or red, bitter or sweet, noisy or silent, and of sweet or foul odor, my mind does not feel compelled to bring in as necessary qualities. Without the senses as our guides, reason or imagination unaided would probably never arrive at qualities like these. Hence I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.

Very deep stuff, and strangely—even suspiciously—ahead of its time; although at the same time, far behind the Jovians’ understanding of things. Galileo knew perfectly well that he was describing his state of mind before Aurora’s tutorials; that was something he wanted to do here, just to clarify his thoughts in their evolution. He wrote as he had always written. That it was also true that what he was calling effects of consciousness extended beyond heat and tickling and taste and colors to fundamental qualities like number, boundedness, motion or rest, location or time—that was something he knew but still could not feel. It remained a conundrum to him, part of the feeling of anachronism always disorienting him.

That these sentences of Il Saggiatore could be construed as denying the reality of the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood, during the sacrament of Communion—that they were, in other words, according to the Council of Trent and the doctrinal law of the Holy Church, heretical statements—did not occur to Galileo, or to any of his friends and associates.

But it did to some of his enemies.

In the midst of all this excitement, and Galileo’s preparation for another journey to Rome, the weekly letter would arrive from Maria Celeste:

Galileo heaved heavy sighs as he read this. He arranged to have blankets sent over to the convent, and with them a letter asking Maria Celeste if there was anything else he could do. He was sure to go to Rome sometime soon to meet with the new pope, he told her. He could ask the Sanctissimus for something for the convent, perhaps some land to generate income; perhaps a direct endowment, or some simpler form of alms. What did she think the nuns would like most?

Maria Celeste wrote back to say that alms would be very well, but what they needed most was a decent priest.

Galileo cursed when he read this. “Another priest. They need food!”

Her letter went on to explain:

Since our convent finds itself in poverty, as you know, Sire, it cannot satisfy the confessors when they leave by giving them their salary before they go. I happen to know that three of those who were here are owed quite a large sum of money, and they use this debt as occasion to come here often to dine with us, and to get friendly with several of the nuns. And, what is worse, they then carry us in their mouths, spreading rumors and gossiping about us wherever they go, to the point where our convent is considered the concubine of the whole Casentino region, whence come these confessors of ours, more suited to hunting rabbits than guiding souls.

Galileo couldn’t be sure if she knew what hunting rabbits meant in Tuscan slang, or if she actually meant hunting rabbits; but he suspected the former, and laughed, both shocked and pleased at her sophistication.

And believe me, Sire, if I ever began telling you all the absurdities committed by our present confessor, I should never be done, for they are as numerous as they are incredible.

She was so smart. Surely she was her father’s daughter, for the acorn never fell far from the tree (except when it did, as with his son). Indeed it sometimes seemed to Galileo that Maria Celeste was the only sane and competent nun in the entire convent, carrying the other thirty on her slim shoulders, every day and every night: supervising the cooking, nursing their ills, making their preparations, writing their letters, and keeping her sister out of the wine cellar, which apparently was a new problem to add to all Arcangela’s others. Maria Celeste’s letters to Galileo were almost always written in the seventh or eighth hour of the day, which began at sunset, meaning she was getting only a couple of hours of sleep before the bell rang for compline, and their predawn prayers would begin. The relentless routine was beginning to tell on her, Galileo could see when he took his baskets of food over. She had no meat on her bones, there were always dark rings under her eyes, and she complained of stomach trouble; she was losing her teeth; and she was just twenty-three years old. He feared for her.

And yet still her letters came, each one exhibiting intense care to make it shapely on the page, utilizing her characteristic clear hand with its big loops, and the flowing proud signature at the bottom.

But so often filled with trouble. One morning Galileo watched himself opening her latest letter, full of a sudden dread, and started to read, then shouted with alarm. “Oh no! No! Jesus Christ! Pierrrrrrr-a! Fill a basket, and find Cartophilus and tell him to get Cremonini ready. Their mother abbess has gone mad.”

This worthy was no longer Vinta’s sister but another woman—small, dark, and intense. “She’s slashed herself thirteen times with a kitchen knife,” Galileo told La Piera as he pulled on his boots, finishing Maria Celeste’s letter as he did so. “These people are not competent to live!” he exclaimed bitterly. “They need an income, some property, a trust—anything!”

La Piera hustled off with a shrug; convents were like that, the shrug said. But she was angry too. “I’ll come along,” she said as she reappeared.

On the way over the hills to San Matteo, it was easy to feel that all this had happened before, because it had. His feet had made the very track through the grass that they now followed. It all just kept happening. Sky as gray as rain.

Over at San Matteo, they found things even worse than Maria Celeste had reported, which was not unusual, but this time far beyond anything previous. Not just the mother abbess but also Arcangela had lost her mind, and on the very same night. Arcangela had apparently heard the abbess screaming in her suicidal hysteria, and in response had begun banging her head against the wall of her room. She had done that until she fell insensible. Now she was conscious, but refusing to speak even to her own sister, who was clinging to Galileo’s arm now, red-eyed with fear and grief, frustration, and sleeplessness. All around her was nothing but weeping and lamentation, as all the sisters demanded her attention at once.

Seeing it, Galileo lost his temper and said to them loudly, “It’s like a henhouse with a fox inside it, except there’s no fox, so you should all shut up! What kind of Christians are you anyway?”

This last sentiment started Maria Celeste crying too, and Galileo enfolded her in his arms. They looked like a bear holding a scarecrow pulled from its pole. She wept on his broad chest, into his beard. “What happened?” he asked again helplessly. “Why?”

She composed herself, and led him back to the dispensary as she told him the story. The mother abbess had been more and more anxious, upset about problems that she would not confess to anyone. At the same time, Suor Arcangela had stopped speaking entirely. The latter had happened before, of course, and although it was a cause for concern, there was nothing they could do about it, as they knew from long experience. “So we were limping along the best we could, when last night the full moon brought on a lunacy in the mother abbess. She was heard crying out, and when we went to her chambers to see what was wrong, we found her slashing her arms with one of the kitchen knives, and moaning. In the uproar we didn’t hear Arcangela yelling in her room,”—a private room that Galileo had paid for, to keep her out of the dormitory at night, where she had trouble sleeping, and disrupted the others as well. “When we finally heard Arcangela, I was the first one there, and I found her—pounding her forehead, hard, against the wall! The bricks had cut her and she was bleeding. It was a cut on the forehead, you know how those bleed. Her face was covered with it. And she still wouldn’t speak. It took four of us to get her to stop beating her brains out, and now she is restrained on her bed. She’s just begun to talk again. But all she does is beg to be let free.”

“You poor girl.” Galileo followed the shivering Maria Celeste to his younger daughter’s room.

Arcangela saw him in the doorway and turned her battered head away. She was tied to the mattress with innumerable strips of cloth.

Then: “Please,” she begged the wall. “Let me go.”

“But how can we,” Galileo asked her, “when you harm yourself like this? What would you have us do?”

She would not answer him.

After sunset, in the last hour of light, they headed back to Bellos-guardo. It was clear to all of them that no matter Maria Celeste’s courage and ability, they had left behind a convent in desperate disarray. On the trail over the hills, Galileo was full of heavy sighs. That night he sat at the table before his roast capon and bottle of wine, and barely ate. La Piera moved around slowly, cleaning up with as little noise as possible.

“Fetch Cartophilus to me,” Galileo said at last.

A few minutes later the old man stood before him in the lantern light. Clearly he had been asleep.

“What can I do, maestro?”

“You know what you can do,” Galileo replied, with a look as black as any of Arcangela’s. The family resemblance in that moment was startling.

Cartophilus knew when Galileo could not be denied. He ducked his head and nodded as he left the room.

That night when Galileo was out on the back terrace, looking stubbornly through his telescope at his little Jovian clock in the sky, Cartophilus emerged from the workshop, carrying the pewter box that held the teletrasporta under one arm.

“You’ll send me to Hera?” Galileo said.

Cartophilus nodded. “I’m pretty sure she still has the other end of it.”

When Cartophilus had prepared the box, Galileo stood next to it. He looked up at Jupiter, so bright up there near the zenith. Suddenly it bloomed.